Friday, 24 January 2014

The lack of recent blog posts is a clear reflection of what
happens if you return to full-time work. This past month or so has seen all my
energy sucked into marking, organising and preparing for assessments across all
three years of BA Fine Art, as well as continuing to teach on the evening access
programme.

However, I have a brief moment of respite before a marks
meeting so will attempt to put down some reflections on what I have been doing
before I forget.

First year students were given two new briefs to work on in
preparation for studio moves into strands which will happen next week.

The first brief OUFA404 Materials and Processes is centred
on documenting all the new materials and processes they are encountering. This
brief was designed to run alongside the fact that workshops in clay, plaster,
wood, metal, print, photography, video, specialist software such as Illustrator
and Photoshop etc are being held, as well as the fact that they are preparing
for entry into their specialist strand.

The second brief OUFA409 Fine Art Practices 3, is designed
to help students think through how their practice might be affected by the move
into a specific strand area, and it gives them time to start to demonstrate their
own unique position in relation to their practice. In particular it stresses
the impact that material thinking might have on their practice, this being why
this brief is presented alongside the Materials and Processes brief.

The above are the two brief fronts, on their backs is all the
technical information such as learning outcomes and weightings etc.

Both briefings involved students sitting through my PowerPoint
presentations. So as it saves me time find these below. I did of course talk extensively
and elliptically around these slides with much walking about and answering
questions, but the slides may give a flavour of what was being introduced.

These are a selection of the slides to support the Fine Art Practices 3
briefing.

These are the slides to support Materials and Processes
briefing.

The lecture finished with students listening to Reich's 'Come Out' as an example of how process and content can become synthesised.

Friday, 3 January 2014

The technocratic, managerial educational culture we
have to endure reflects our technocratic, managerial political culture. There
is a growing feeling of distrust for a society that constantly seeks to find
out more about us. The desire for statistical information is supposed to be for
our own good. Students’ complaints are supposed to highlight weaknesses in
their educational provision, whilst a focus group reports back that immigration
is an issue that needs tackling if the Government is to ensure they remain
popular in the polls. Personnel departments become human resource departments
and make decisions based on what is legal rather than what is right and
bureaucracy stultifies the individual and takes away the power to make personal
choices.

The longer this situation endures the less individual decision-making
based on a moral framework will be acceptable. Commodification,
commercialisation and the profit motive appear to have replaced moral judgment,
individual responsibility and a sense of duty. When I started teaching I was
aware that what I was doing was embarking on a difficult moral path, one that
would involve my full being. It was my duty to educate, “If it moves, teach
it,” as Patrick Oliver often used to say. The job of an educator was to help draw
out that which lies within. My job was clearly to develop the potential of
anyone who wanted to be educated and the resources at my disposal were anything
that I could come up with that would do the job. I had to therefore be
constantly inventive and responsive to individual needs. However at some point
during the 1980s/90s there was a sea shift. It was decided that there ought to
be national standards and that these standards could be facilitated by
clarifying what it was that students were meant to learn. The idea of learning
outcomes was therefore introduced and these were embedded into what we now know
as the brief structure. The educational process became predictable and totally
controlled, as if life was something totally separate. Nature, its serendipity and
its unpredictability had been ironed out of the equation. What was meant to alleviate
the problems of bad teaching became a rod for all backs, in particular those
who worked intuitively and in response to each changing moment. The art college
took these things on board and the brief now lies at the centre of our whole
educational process. Perhaps it’s time to therefore have a much closer look at
how this works.

However it’s
also worth reminding any reader that regardless of the way they are presented,
facts are always grounded in a story, which communicates a viewpoint, which is
attached to a set of values. This understanding necessitates certain
questions: Whose story is this? Who benefits from this story?
Who loses in the story? In the case of the brief it was the student who
was supposed to benefit and so of course was the design profession as a whole,
because it was believed at the time that the brief lay central to the design
business. Therefore if students were used to responding to a brief they would
be better able to respond to briefs as professional designers. In reality I
would suggest that the only people who actually benefit from this situation are
the statistics people, the quality controllers and those who’s vested interests
are getting people to conform to certain ways of doing things.

My initial
thoughts on looking at the brief are twofold. The first is that this is a
series of boxes and boxes are designed to contain things, to hold them in place
and that one of the things we are supposed to be doing is encouraging students
to ‘think outside of the box. The second is that in terms of the text hierarchy
by far the most important headline is MODULE ASSESSMENT BRIEF. This brief’s
purpose is therefore to enable you to be assessed on your ability to learn from
this particular module. Everything is clearly defined and presented as if there
are clear boundaries between each element.

You are also given
information about the numerical value of this particular brief and its outcomes
in terms of weightings and how many credits the module as a whole is worth.
Each outcome has a code and the dates are to be identified as to when
everything takes place. All is clearly measurable and contained within a
determined timeframe. What is clear is that everything is fixed and nailed
down. The day of the briefing is fixed and the deadline decided upon. Failure
to meet the deadline will result in a penalty of 5 marks being deducted for
each day a student is late handing in the work.

I’ve worked as
both a fine artist and as a designer. I’ve never had to work within these types
of constraints. Usually my experience has been that a brief is negotiated
between the designer and a client, sometimes a client manager being the person
who will continue the ongoing negotiations between the designer and the client.
The client is often unsure as to what they actually want, usually coming to the
designer because they have seen something else similar to what they think they
want. The process being one of gradual awareness that either the client is very
fixed as to what they want and the designer is gradually getting a clearer and
clearer picture of what that is, or the designer is able to ‘educate’ the
client as to what is really needed. In both cases it is ‘people skills’ that will
facilitate this process, these being far more important than ‘design skills’.

In order to try and be a little more
objective about these things I decided to see what the design industry itself
felt about briefs. This is verbatim from the industry guidelines on the best
brief design:

“…it’s worth noting that while many examples of briefing formats were
considered and their contents used as valuable inputs to this guide, it was
decided by the participating trade bodies not to produce a standard briefing
template for the industry in the shape of a standard pre-printed form.

There were three main reasons for this. First, because each individual
client company has its own culture and ‘way of doing things around here’ and we
did not think it appropriate to try and impose a ‘one size fits all’ format on
them.

Second, there are many who believe that the pre-printed form, with
predetermined allocation of space to particular elements of the brief, can lead
to a form-filling mentality that militates against real thinking about the
issues.

Third, while it’s strongly recommended that there should be both a
written and verbal brief for every agency assignment, it’s clear that a
leaflet, a website, a tactical press ad, an event or a TV commercial will all
have very different emphases and information content. Therefore the completion
of the individual sections of the client briefs for them will take up widely
varying numbers of words, rendering a standard template impractical.

Thus we hope that clients structure their briefs by using them as a
framework rather than a straightjacket.

In summary, the client brief should define the two ends of a bridge:
“Where are we now”, and “Where do we want to be?”

Briefs such as the ones referred to above, were for
the design and advertising industry, industries that believe that each brief
should be designed according to the situation. The College of Art is using a
fixed brief structure for all its courses in an effort to standardise the
educational process. This has been done in the name of maintaining quality
standards. Standards have to be measured against something, so points have to
be fixed, the brief has become one of those fixed points and therefore is a
powerful fulcrum that can be used to lever into the educational process certain
consistencies that become expectations. These very expectations of course are
what I would argue are the brief’s fundamental and deepest problem. If students
come to read the brief as a crutch or loadstone that can be returned to in
order to understand something, they will be involved in some sort of Pavlovian
training, each time they see a brief it will initiate a particular response,
but as has been pointed out the design industry doesn’t standardise briefs and some
areas of art practice don’t use briefs at all. As with the dog that responds to
the red light turning on, what happens if the signal changes? We are supposed
to be educating not training.

Years ago I worked for a design agency. When jobs came
in they were allocated to different designers and the allocation was based on
experience and skill set. Every week we had a team meeting when all the jobs
were evaluated as to progress and timelines. Some jobs took longer than others,
some could be solved very quickly and were problem free, others had hidden
problems that only came to light during the process and timescales were
readjusted to reflect these various situations. The idea that briefs should be
nailed down to specific days for completion and actual briefing days decided
upon months in advance seems totally unrealistic and again unlike the practices
as developed in ‘real-world’ situations.
What was far more important was understanding why a job was taking
longer than expected and communicating this to all the stakeholders. This meant
that you had to develop a high degree of self awareness, you had to be
realistic as to your own limitations and working skill sets and you would have
to understand when and how to involve others in the process in order to ensure
jobs were completed within a reasonable timeframe.

As a fine artist I’m very aware that working processes
must involve the unexpected and that once confronted it will need to be
sensitively responded to. The unknown element being central to the need for
constant surprise and innovation, throwing a spanner into the works is
something that you need to do occasionally in order to stop yourself becoming
predictable. This is an open-ended process and although there are deadlines
such as exhibition dates and submission deadlines, these simply become moments
for reflection, not divisions between different types of activity. I’m always
working with materials and I’m always struggling with concepts, but sometimes
the materials investigation is the most important element and at other times I
need to undertake conceptual research. Each activity needs a proper amount of
time devoted to it and when it all works together seamlessly that is wonderful
but I cant predict when that will be and for how long.

When I was a teenager I used to have a recurring
dream. The whole Earth was being built over, fields were covered in concrete as
far as the eye could see; nature was being destroyed. Most of the dream
consisted of my wondering around looking for cracks in the concrete, cracks
that allowed tiny seedlings to break through and I spent my time trying to
force these cracks open, but having to do this whilst hiding from the unseen oppressive
powers that had decided to eliminate nature and to flatten out all argument
with what was seen as progress. Every time I hear the phrase, “Once we have the
systems in place, we will be able to…” I feel as if I’m trapped in that old
dream. Some will accuse me of still being a Romantic and that I have never
really escaped my adolescence, but I know what I feel and I feel as if the
activity I love and have devoted most of my working life to has been forced
into a straightjacket. The only reason for this must be that someone somewhere
believes that it not only needs controlling but that it is also in some way
‘mad’ or ‘deranged’. This need for control is something society has had to
confront at different times and in different guises, sometimes it’s simply a
fear of ‘the other’, at other times a desire for conformity, at its worst it
can lead to fascism. We live in a complex society and in order to deal with
that various methods have been designed to ensure that we are not subjected to
the disintegration of law and order due to the conflicting desires of those
within it. However there has to be a balance and older systems of morality and
duty are distrusted or felt to be outmoded, perhaps what I yearn for is some
sort of more spiritual answer to the problem, a return to a set of deeper
meanings that can be used as a guide to decision making. I still feel that art
and its practice can be used to help find images that give us insight into what
is the age-old problem of making sense of our existence. This is something
artists have done from time immemorial, whether it was by making images on cave
walls or the vision of music as a spiritual power, each society having to find
an expression suited to its particular circumstances. At the core of the
problem of the fine art brief is that it diverts attention away from far more
important underlying issues, the main ones being why do artists work and what
should they be doing?